Big milestones are upon us in the shift from coal to clean energy. Last week the utility Vistra announced it would retire four Illinois coal plants, on the heels of news that Southern Company will retire two coal plants in Georgia, bringing us to a total of 296 US coal plants announced to retire since 2010. That means coal plant retirement #300 is just around the corner and in the US we are on track to meet the call of the world’s climate scientists to phase out coal power by 2030. And in April for the first time in our nation’s history, we generated more power from renewable energy than from coal.
I know, there’s a lot of scary news out there – the Amazon and the Arctic are burning, July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, and Ohio recently passed what Dave Roberts of Vox called “the worst energy bill of the 21st century.” But stop for a moment and consider the amazing energy milestones we’re reaching in the US with every passing month. Within them, we’ll find some of the keys we need to unlock solutions to the climate crisis.
When I first started working on coal over 15 years ago, I was executive director of a wonderful organization that’s still thriving, Appalachian Voices, and we were trying to stop the coal mining practice of blowing up entire mountains, known as mountaintop removal, a highly destructive form of mining that still continues to this day. One of the most consistent arguments I heard against ending mountaintop removal went something like this: “We get half of our electricity from coal. It’s always been that way, and it always will be. If we don’t have this coal, our lights will go out and our electricity bills will skyrocket.”
Now here we are, and renewable energy is providing more power than coal for the first time in our nation’s history – a mere 20 percent of our electricity came from coal in April, down from 50 percent a decade ago. And guess what? Our lights haven’t gone out. Our electricity bills haven’t skyrocketed.
If anything, it’s coal that’s threatening to send our electric bills through the roof. Coal can no longer compete with renewable energy in most parts of the country, and our aging fleet of coal plants are offering power that’s much more costly than the renewable energy and the market price of electricity.
